G1

When we first saw [Jeffrey Nelson]’s G1 based robot we immediately wondered what the transport for the controls was. The G1‘s hardware supports USB On-The-Go, but it’s not implemented in Android yet. It turns out he’s actually sending commands by using DTMF tones through the headphone adapter. The audio jack is connected to a DTMF decoder that sends signals to the bot’s Arduino. He wrote client/server code in Java to issue commands to the robot. You can find that code plus a simple schematic on his site. A video of the bot is embedded below.

[Luke Hutchison] has come up with a rather clever hack to get multitouch support on the G1. He wrote a patch against the Synaptics touchscreen driver. When two fingers are placed, the driver reports the x/y of the midpoint and a radius for the size field. If only one finger is used, the size is reported as zero. The nice thing about this approach is that it’s backwards compatible; the extra data will be ignored by current apps. Unfortunately, Google’s Android team says that if multitouch is ever added, it would identify individual fingers and definitely not using this method.

It’s the season of gift giving. Did you get anything interesting/hackable? What will you work on next?

We gave ourselves an Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1). We hadn’t really considered getting a G1 until the ADP1 was announced… It’s actually a lot of fun to use as our primary phone. Our favorite app so far is connectbot, the SSH client. The interface is really smart, way better than all of the iPhone clients.

In our Dev Phone 1 excitement last week, we somehow overlooked phoneWreck’s teardown of the T-Mobile G1. The complex slider mechanism is certainly worth looking out. One of the major oddities they point out is the inclusion of two vibration motors. One is mounted next to the SIM on the mainboard. While the other is mounted in the frame next to the earpiece. We wonder what was gained/solved by using two. The phone also includes a digital compass module. We’d like a more detailed explanation of how the Xilinx CPLD is used. From this article in 2006, it seems HTC uses them to generate custom clock signals and switching off devices for power management.

While working towards open-sourcing Android, the team continued to work on new features in their own private development branch. These have now been published publicly in the “cupcake” branch. There’s a lot of interesting new features and bug fixes included. We’ve got a rundown of many of the significant additions after the break.

Google has new program to sell Android phones directly to developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 is both SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. SIM-unlocked means you can use it on any GSM carrier you want. Hardware-unlocked means you can run any system you want on the phone, not just officially signed ones. No more need to worry about security patches taking away your root access.

The device is $399. You will need to purchase it through the Android Market as a registered developer (a $25 fee). We wonder how long before the unsigned bootloader starts getting flashed to T-Mobile phones.

Two new Android phones have surfaced recently which may prove just as friendly: the Kogan Agora Pro and the QiGi i6.

UPDATE: While shipping is free in US, it is incredibly expensive everywhere else. Yes, we bought one.

The target release date may be over five months out, but the Ubuntu team is already pushing the first alphas of Jaunty Jackalope out the door. The new release is not for the weak and is intended solely for people who want to vet bugs and contribute to the project. The release is designed to bring Ubuntu back in line with Debian. One of the areas they’re working on is the ARM port (we saw the Debian version on the G1).